Patachou Farmers: Full Hand Farm

Do you know the true meaning of sourcing locally, being farm-to-table, supporting a community of farmers, and other buzzwords that seem to be synonymous with every new restaurant opening?

Patachou, Inc. Restaurants are proud to support more than 30 local farmers and producers, all within 100 miles of Indianapolis. We’d like to show you what we mean when we say Patachou Inc. uses the highest quality ingredients we can source, often local and organic. We’ll be visiting and showcasing some of the local farms we source over the coming growing season, to introduce you to the farmers and makers who help make Patachou, Inc. a radically better company.

Our first farm field trip took us to Full Hand Farm, a small-scale family vegetable farm in Noblesville operated by husband and wife team Eli and Genesis (with help from adorable farm hands like baby Ezra and Ruby the farm pup). Both natives of Indianapolis, they spent eight years in Portland where their love for local food was born, and ultimately headed back to the Midwest to answer the growing demand for local produce. In 2012, Full Hand Farm broke ground.

Eli and Genesis met Patachou Inc. Executive Chef Tyler Herald six months before Napolese Pizzeria at the Fashion Mall opened in 2013 and at a time when Tyler was looking to increase local procurement. A little less than four years later, Patachou, Inc. accounts for 60% of Full Hand’s total restaurant sales. Boom.

“We had a meeting in December that year to talk about what kinds of vegetables and what kinds of quantities he was looking for, and left thinking that if this guy was for real it would be a complete game changer for our business,” Genesis said. “May rolled around and we called him up once we had produce rolling in and it turned out he was for real, and it changed the trajectory of our business.”

Full Hand Farm contributes arugula, head lettuce, heirloom tomatoes, radishes, leeks, rainbow carrots, beets, kale, chard and more for Napolese and Petite Chou. As for Public Greens; “Public Greens is a full representation of everything we grow; if we grow it, Tyler wants it at PG”.

Learning about Genesis and Eli’s connection to the Patachou brand was quite possibly the best part of the afternoon. Both growing up in the Meridian-Kessler/So-Bro area, Eli remembers his grandma sending him as a little boy to buy eggs from Martha’s hens on Saturdays, and Genesis recalls eating her first avocado, both at the original Cafe Patachou location. It doesn’t get much sweeter.

“It’s really meaningful to us that a place that was a part of our growing up years in Indianapolis is now such a big part of our adult years here, and is now helping us raise our own kid by being such a big supporter of our farm.”